This was a really influential, quiet but small book. With illustrations and text, the messaging about love and the world holds wisdom that anybody could use especially in this world.

I liked this less than Gibson's other collections, but then it was a compilation. Regardless, it was amazing as always, and I hope to eventually see them perform.

I read this book awhile ago - thanks to y’all! And I absolutely loved it and still love to handsell to customers. I saw them not too long after perform in DC and they were, of course, incredible and made me cry so much. Andrea Gibson breathes so much hope into the devastation.

I'm not good with poetry, ans I'm not good with feelings in my social life. But I conected so much with this narrative.
I really love it. I'm going to search more about the autor, this deserves more recognition

My blog was down during the time I reviewed this book but I did post a review on Amazon. I love Andrea Gibson's poetry and would always recommend her to poetry lovers.

I'm a big fan of Andrea Gibson and was excited when I got approved to read a galley copy of their latest work. I've been a fan every since I saw Gibson in person about seven years ago at a conference. Take Me With You was a great continuation of their previous collections, which were all wonderful as well.

The topics highlighted in these poems were some i love to see shown in every form, for me however this didn’t really hit the spot. I imagine this is because the instagram/tumblr style of poetry isn’t for me, but i’m glad i read it and gave it a shot. I think i would read more of this author’s work if i came across it, but i wouldn’t run out on publication day.

This collection of poems is a quick and, at times engrossing, read. Some pieces hit in the gut and were extremely full of impact, especially those covering familial topics. Other pieces fell a little flat. Overall, a good collection and I loved the addition of the illustrations.

This is a witty, raw, and passionate collection of poetry that included a lot of enjoyable illustrations to go along with some of the poems. Gibson (they/them for the purpose of this review) is an LGBTQ poet who has the ability to cut themselves open and bleed all over the page. You feel the emotion behind their work and there are a lot of quotable bits inside. I will note that the ARC Kindle version I received was very difficult to read because of the layout, so I'll probably pick up a hard copy of this book so I can appreciate how it was intended to be read rather than the jumble that I just went through. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

I really, really wanted to like this poetry collection. The author, Andrea Gibson, is non-binary and writes LGBTQ poems. I am a non-binary person who writes poems about being lesbian as fuck. On paper, it seems a perfect match.

However, this collection wasn’t for me. I don’t know if this was because of my Kindle formatting, or if Gibson’s work really is all over itself on the page, with random letters capitalised. I found it difficult to work out where a poem ended and where another began.

I’m also not a fan of free verse poetry. It seems like a cop out to me, and Gibson’s work reads more like abstract prose. Give me a terza rima or a sonnet any day of the week. Gibson also uses pop culture references that sour the poem, such as ‘You look like Marilyn Monroe and it makes me wanna run … for President’.

However, I just wanted to write down my favourite lines to prove that I actually did like some of the poetry! I can’t work out what poems these are actually from, but I hope you enjoy these lines too.

‘Do you know the night you told me you have a crush on my ears I swore to never become Van Gogh? [And look. They’re both still here.] The use of Van Gogh brings about this overwhelming idea of sadness and depression, and cutting bits of yourself up to offer up to other people. The second line also gives Gibson power, that she made a promise, and for once, she managed to keep it.

‘They want you to buy your blush from a store instead of letting bloom from your butterFlies’. Again, I’m not sure if the random F is just my kindle app playing up, but I love the alliteration of the line. It could do with some pruning, and for most of this book I wish I could go over it with a red pen, but I love the bloom and blush and butterflies.

‘It’s cold where I come from, I learned to drown young’. This is the type of line that I want to tattoo onto my rib cage, it makes goosebumps rise on my skin. Gibson’s past is summed up in one line, of feeling different, and wrong, and hurting constantly.

My final favourite line is this ‘half of us already dead to our families before we die‘. A powerful representation of LGBTQ children, and how we are cast out from our families, ignored and forgotten, and never spoken about again.

In conclusion, this collection will only be getting two stars from me. I only liked a certain few lines from the odd mismatch of poems, but I hope that Gibson will produce more interesting works in the future.

Thank you NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for a review.

I LOVE Andrea Gibson's work and this is no different. I had the pleasure of interviewing her for a story a few years back, and I love seeing new pieces from her.

I didn't mean to read Take Me With You in one sitting, but the bus ride was long and at every page I felt more alive. It was an emotional roller coaster that I will certainly be taking again... and again and again and again.

These are excerpts of poems. Some of them were new to me, some I've had the pleasure of listening to live. Some of these few lines managed to take me right back to that extraordinary moment when Andrea Gibson was in front of me, their voice everything. They are magic and they are real.

I hope that whoever runs into this collection without having read them before feels the need to dive, eyes and heart open, into their complete body of work. It's an experience.

Couldn't be more grateful for the ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Take Me With You is definitely an appropriate title. As I finished reading I felt that this would be a wonderful book to keep with you and read passages from whenever life is getting you down because “beating yourself up is never a fair fight.”

There are three parts that cover sexuality, gender, politics, feminism, family and accepting oneself. I breezed through this little book in half an hour but I was so taken with it that I know I’ll find myself revisiting it often. Not to mention, the illustrations were such a delightful addition, I felt they added whimsy and charm to balance out the important topics mentioned in the text.

While I enjoyed every part of this little pocket book, I think Part I was my favorite. It reads like an open love letter. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but rather, to lovers past, present, and future. Gibson does an incredible job of capturing our state of mind as we become more aware of ourselves and our sexuality and how we interact with others.

The rest of the book I found myself nodding in agreement or smiling because it felt like they really get it, you know? It felt like the author was taking my hand and guiding me through. Not necessarily gentle at times, but in a way that I felt like I was truly learning something. I found that comforting.

I’m admittedly not an expert in poetry and at times this book read more like a collection of statements, but each one touched me as an affirmation to some of my own feelings or as an eye opener to things I hadn’t thought about until now.

I would definitely recommend giving it a look.

I thoroughly enjoyed the little poetry book Take Me With You by Andrea Gibson. I like the fact that the author shares the entire range of their emotions and feelings - because that's what life is. Not just one thing or the other, not even at a specific time - there are more shades of grey than there are of black and white, because we are always feeling more than we can express in a simple way. We are a jumble of emotions, a muddy mix of colors, sharp, soft, biting, loving, hoping, wondering, resentful, grateful.... And Andrea Gibson shares them all with us. Some reviewers have disparaged this book as poetry-lite, or quips rather than poems. But if they make you feel, if they make you think, hasn't the goal been attained?

P.S. - I like all the little drawings too!!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Plume for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.

I got this ARC for review from Netgalley, so thank you! This was a really good book. I always liked Andrea's poetry. Ever since I stumbled upon their spoken word videos, their name has been on the back of my mind. Both longer poems and one liner were amazing and strong. There is one moment in this book where it says something along the lines of "every love poem I write ends up being political because I use the pronoun her", and I can't help but relating to that. Andrea beautifully talks about gender and love. It's queer poetry, through and through - They talk about loving girls. They talk about their experience with gender. And about violence and feminism. I couldn't stop highlighting sentences and paragraphs all through the book - let it be a poem about love or a poem about society, or both - a lot of them packed a punch.

I got this book because I knew the name. I didn't really know anything else. I had seen some of her spoken word performances on youtube from when I was a baby queer. I was only thirteen or fourteen the first time I heard the name. I never really stopped to appreciate what was before me. 

This book jumps around from topic to topic, line to line, in a frenzied pace. It was wonderful. It was like reading the thoughts of someone who is brilliant from experience, not studying. So many of the lines related to my life growing up queer, though out queerness is a bit different in the end. 

There were lines that called back what I had learned in college in my Women and Gender Studies classes. The idea that anyone could classify their love as political or just writing a poem with a pronoun change could be dangerous or wonderful. That feeling I had then of how wrong some things are and how they need to change, only grew more powerful reading that someone else had that thought and it seemed so nonchalant. 

This book did things to me. I swear I will be a fan of poetry if this trend of liking poetry books keeps happening.

Take Me With You is a poetry pocket book highlighting a wide variety of relatable topics, split into three sections: Love, The World, and On Becoming. These poems talk about the good and bad parts of love: how it feels to love someone, to be loved, and to have your heart broken. Gibson also tackles big themes about the world such as creation versus destruction, women's rights, the internal struggle of someone who is transgender, feminism, heaven, the broken parts of America, gun violence, tolerance, veterans, war, the pressures social media put on us, and kindness. In the last section titled "On Becoming" Gibson shares thoughts on struggling painfully through mental health challenges like anxiety in order to end up at a place where you love ALL of yourself, including the flaws which help to make you who you are.

After reading other reviews I think the final book is three long poems rather than a bunch of short poems. I read the ebook version which had each poem on a different page. Reading these words as three long poems would be a completely different experience.

There are some insightful and unique comparisons such as, needing someone as much as the moon needs the sea, or comparing a room in a home to the palm of a hand, or how in Autumn the leaves fall as if they are in love with the ground.

Either way, Take Me With You is a delightful little book about HOPE and I would recommend this to everyone, especially to readers who want to read more poetry that isn't filled with complicated prose.

Go to Andrea Gibson’s website, https://www.andreagibson.org/ and see how they are marketing this little pocketbook of inspirational quotes.

"A pocket book, by Andrea Gibson. Out January 23rd, 2018
A book small enough to carry with you, with messages big enough to stay with you, from one of the most quotable and influential poets of our time.
Andrea Gibson explores themes of love, gender, politics, sexuality, family, and forgiveness with stunning imagery and a fierce willingness to delve into the exploration of what it means to heal and to be different in this strange age. Take Me With You, illustrated throughout with evocative line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart."

Andrea Gibson is a non-binary spoken word artist whose YouTube videos are heartfelt and powerful. I dare anyone to listen to the video ‘Orlando” and not be affected by her honesty and powerful presence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNadn...

This little pocket book moved me. Gibson distills the thoughts of many of us living on the fringe of accepted society. Well done.

eARC received with thanks from publisher via NetGalley for review.

This book was absolutely beautiful and it’s so hard to put my thoughts and feelings into words. First, let’s talk about the formatting though, because that confused me a bit at first and looking at some Goodreads review, I wasn’t the only one.

This book, as I understood it, consists of three poems. Not multiple short ones, but three long poems. You can distinguish them because they’re numbered and by their names: On Love, On The World and On Becoming, but I can see why some people on Goodreads are confused and thought there are multiple short poems, because I did at first too.

Another important thing to know going in this book, is that Andrea Gibson is at the forefront of the spoken word movement. Before I knew that, I thought the poems read like spoken word poetry. Knowing that Gibson is a spoken word poet, I think this was deliberate. Some reviewers on Goodreads criticised the use of all caps, but I read that as Gibson raising their voice, like they do in spoken word poetry.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about the book in more detail. I absolutely love spoken word poetry. I’m not an expert on poetry, but it’s probably my favourite form. Thus, Take Me With You was right up my alley, especially since it’s LGBTQ+ poetry.

I found Take Me With You absolutely beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful… I’m starting to feel like Lady Gaga here

But seriously, I am in awe and in love with this book. I have no words. Once I finished it, I immediately reread it again and cried my eyes out a little bit more. I’ve marked pretty much the entire book on my kindle and I need a physical copy to hold close and take with me* asap.

* Ha see what I did there

There were so many powerful quotes, but I also loved how easily Gibson switched between serious or beautiful and funny

''I find great comfort in believing anyone who has ever broken up with me has probably never gotten over my dog.''

I cannot for the life of my choose one favourite quote, as there are so many. I laughed, smiled and cried (hard) at this amazing book. Some of the sentences in her poems are pure and wholesome, and like I said funny, others? Broke my heart completely and left me a mess.

''When the first responders entered the Pulse nightclub after te massacre in Orlando,
they walked through the horrible scene of bodies and called out, ”If you’re alive, raise your hand.” I was sleeping in a hotel in de midwest at the time but I imagine in that exact moment my hand twitched in my sleep – some unconscious part of me aware that I had a pulse,
that I was alive''

Again, I have no words to describe how I feel about this book, what it meant reading it and how much I love it. I highly recommend picking this one up.

Another fabulous and heartwrenching collection from Andrea Gibson that strikes to the heart of what it means to be human, but also to be human and different.